Insanity is defined as doing the same things and expecting different results. This is also an apt description for what is being proposed in our nation’s capitol, with respect to how to stimulate the American economy.
President-elect Barack Obama, once he takes office, should re-direct the hundreds of billions of recycled stimulus dollars into our nation’s military industrial infrastructure. The jobs created in our nation’s defense industries are the type of jobs that pay annual wages a family can actually live on.
Plus, these jobs are value-added. New public investment in cutting edge defense technologies will also have civilian applications and this will help drive entire new private industries into existence. It would also make America and our allies safer and that ain’t no small thing.
The same is true with the nation’s under-funded space program. We should direct tens, if not hundreds, of billions of new stimulus dollars to our nation’s space and aerospace industries. This would be a boost to Vandenberg AFB and would also have a large multiplier effect in the region’s ecosystem, while creating hundreds of new start-ups and thousands of new head of household jobs in the process.
Moreover, tens of billions of the Obama rescue plan should be invested in our leading research universities. The next generation of information technologies, software applications and other innovations are simply waiting to be funded. And when they are, they will result in additional innovations which will result in even newer technologies that can spin off even newer ones. The direct and indirect impacts for our state would be tremendous.
Obama should abandon his plan to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars bailing out irresponsible state governments that want to build 21st century bridges to a 20th century economy. Instead, through executive order, the new President should streamline the permitting process by relaxing excessive and unnecessary land-use regulations so only those projects that are actually important to a community’s economic security can become shovel ready inside 12-months, instead of the 5-8 years it currently takes. This is especially important here in California.
Finally, Obama should propose a $10,000 tax credit to every family in America so they can send their kids to a local school that works. And every teacher who performs at a level of excellence should receive a $25,000 tax-free bonus at the end of the school year. If we force our local public schools to compete for these students and for these new stimulus dollars and we also pay excellent teachers what they are truly worth, not only will we attract the best and the brightest to our nation’s education industry, we would immediately begin to see our nation’s public school system improve dramatically. And nothing would stimulate the economy over the long haul more than that.